D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
Sonny Bunch takes on all the writers who made their careers in Washington, D.C., before claiming that it was insufferable. He highlights, for instance, David Frum who said he had to turn to fiction to describe how horrible it is (for what it's worth, my husband reports that the fiction -- which he just began reading -- is quite good). There's a mention of Conor Friedersdorf's "The Tyranny of Washington, D.C." about how awful it is that all the ideological movements in the country are packed into a single dysfunctional city. And don't forget Glenn Greenwald blaming the fact that he's treated as a fringe figure on how D.C. can't handle his brave truth telling.
Is D.C. simply "too callow to deal with crisis, too cloistered to understand the rest of the country, and too clubby to deal with outside beliefs?" Bunch asks? No:
D.C. isn’t a venal creature of its own creation, as anyone who sticks around long enough comes to realize. Contrary to what the discourse police will have you believe, it’s a town populated by powerbrokers elected by voters who solicit campaign contributions from the employers of voters to lobby on the behalf of the companies that pay their salaries. If the public wants to be disappointed with anyone for gridlock in the Senate and a super-partisan House and a White House more interested in pushing radical health care reform instead of dealing with the economic crisis, well, they should look in the mirror.
It’s not as if the masses are clamoring to get control of spending or to raise their own taxes—there isn’t a majority to cut a single category of spending, and the only group willing to increase taxes are the poor on the rich. (And even that support is in decline.) Medicare will bankrupt America; Social Security will go bankrupt before that happens; or wars will do what Medicare and Social Security failed to do.
Taxes aren’t going up anytime soon, nor should they since they’ll retard growth. Or maybe they should go up immediately since, you know, all the bankrupting and tax cuts don’t retard growth at all. If only Greenwald’s bold truth-tellers could rack up better than, well, last place among serious candidates, we could fix things.
We face hard choices and the public doesn’t want to make them. And since the public doesn’t want to make them, the people they send to Washington have no incentive to make them. All the tent dwelling, Tea Partying in the world isn’t going to change that.
If D.C. is cynical, it’s only because six percent of the people who send their representatives to work there think Thurgood Marshall is the chief justice of the Supreme Court. What do you expect?
The discourse police who fret over the state of our nation’s capital should turn their eyes elsewhere if they want to solve said nation’s problems.
Put another way, we can't get mad at Mitt Romney or President Obama for proposing the same policy on student loan rates if we can't muster the pressure against either of them to be fiscally responsible.
I'd be mad, but I think Bunch is right. We get the political leadership we deserve.
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Dec '10
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
Stuff like this always shakes my confidence in Locke and calms my loathing of Hobbes.
Dec '10
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
The majority of Americans just don't know much about politics aside from the fact that they must "vote or die!"
They want the benefits of voting without the responsibility that comes with being a voter.
As all the Founder's understood, in order for the Republic to survive, her citizens have to be virtuous, honest, industrious, and knowledgeable. Sadly, today's average American fails most of the required character traits.
Representative government is no more than a reflection of those who it represents. Molly is absolutely right: we get the political leadership we deserve.
Jun '10
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
We're turning into a nation that's half parasites, half hosts, and the number of parasites is growing. It's unsustainable. And when the hosts get too weak, or manage to escape somehow, there will be trouble. If it's not a recipe for all-out civil war, it's certainly a recipe for mob violence, as in Greece.
Apr '12
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
It seems that government (federal, state, local) would seek to increase its size and income in the some way a business would. Thereby it's leaders make more money, wield more power, and (like any profitable venture) remain in positions of authority. Broadly this is true of Republican and Democrat.
Hopefully it is not true of conservative and libertarian.
Missing from our memories may be that Thomas Jefferson unleashed many infamies on the American people in his pursuit of a foreign policy meant to keep us out of the French and British ever-conflict. Doubtful those same Americans elected him to pursue the passage and execution of Embargo and Enforcement Acts. But he did. See John Yoo's Crisis and Command for a discussion of Jefferson's much ignored second presidential term.
To Bunch, can we blame Jefferson's supporters for the expansion of the military (when he campaigned against it) or the incarceration of citizens for attempting black market trade (when Jefferson proclaimed the Alien and Sedition Act unconstitutional)?
As history shows, high office changes people.
Just consider the magnitude of insider trading and corporate shakedowns recently illuminated by Peter Schweitzer and enjoyed universally in D.C.
Edited on April 24, 2012 at 5:55pmJul '11
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
Exactement, Monsieur etoiledunord!
May '10
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
Or a glorious combination of all of these.
There are currently fourteen members of Congress that have been there 37 years or longer. In the last Congress there were 21 House members with a parent who also served in Congress - those are people who were raised in DC and have probably spent more time there than the districts they're supposed to represent.
Apr '12
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
On the other hand it was not until recently that the Republicans and Democrats passed around the mental smelling salts and awoke a segment of the population disbelieving of the profligacy and corruption of the parties.
Recall that the incandescent light bulb ban was passed by Congress and signed by a Republican president.
In our collective rage at "politics as usual" we sought an alternative in Mr. Obama. Now we seek another alternative.
Hopefully in this we may one day cause political climate change where office holders seek the betterment of the country and citizenry instead of hook and crook re-election or mere party domination.
Feb '12
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
Saturday I went to a Tea Party rally here at home. I usually don't attend rallies, but my daughter was singing (her coach is a Tea Party stalwart). The crowd was small, unfortunately, thanks to a schedule change from the week before, but it was enthusiastic. There was no red meat, no vitriol, from the speakers. Just a sad determination that the present administration has to go, or our country may be lost forever.
Many candidates were present, including an unknown presidential candidate, a guy challenging our congressman in the primary, and several people running for the state legislature. None of them had ever run for office before.
I spoke to several folks who said they got involved in politics over the last few years out of fear of the direction the country was taking. They began paying attention, studying the issues, and trying to figure out where things went wrong.
Today they feel they know where things went wrong, and they are working to change the minds of their neighbors. Meeting in groups to study US history and the Constitution, attending rallies, and running for office.
The change to our political class will come from this, or nowhere.
Jan '11
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
There's an H.L. Mencken quote on democracy and how it relates to common people knowing what they want ready to be sprung here.
Nov '11
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
Grouping Frum, Friedersdorf and Greenwald together makes a lot of sense. Also,
Amen to that. We have terrible political dysfunction because of the terrible politicians we've elected. The notion of shared responsibility is so passe - after all, the financial crisis was the fault of either "greedy Wall Street fat cats" or "government kleptocrats", depending on who you ask - never mind the thousands of people who took out mortgages that they knew they could not make payments on. As Dalrymple put it:
This is just as applicable to the elected and the voters.
Apr '11
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
Three topics that deserve more time devoted to them in our schools.
In my years before entering college, there was very scant exposure to those topics. I can remember 1 Economics class for half a semester. 1 Business Law class for a full semester and a few US-centric history classes that covered government. Only the history classes were required, the rest were electives.
I can imagine it would be hard to fix this with the current standardized testing focus optimized towards one narrow skill set. Do we all need to be experts in Calc? Really?
Oct '10
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
The problem with democracy is that I get the government you deserve.
Dec '11
Re: D.C. Is Not The Problem. We Are.
The government is gridlocked because the only cows left to gore are sacred. It was going to happen eventually when the liberals(with a lot of complicit conservatives), decided that their neighbor was a resource to be exploited.
Maggie thatcher told ya so.